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Alaska Native leaders continue to digest the US Supreme Court’s ruling on the Indian Child Welfare Act last week, which rejected efforts to overturn a law that’s been in place for more than four decades.
Rhonda McBride from our flagship station KNBA reports.
Valerie Davidson is an Alaska Native attorney who has dealt with ICWA for much of her career.
During Gov. Bill Walker (I-AK)’s administration, she served as his commissioner for Health and Social Services and helped negotiate a tribal compact that led to improved services for Alaska Native children in child custody cases.
She’s now president of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, which also works to protect the health and well-being of Native children.
Davidson applauded the court’s decision for many reasons, but mainly she says, it helps keep decisions about child welfare closer to home.
“It is really an issue of practicality, for example. So, if you have a child who is in a small village with an average population of 300 people, and there is no state agency physically there to be able to do that intervention, but the tribe is there and can intervene immediately, that’s a much better outcome.”
Davidson, who grew up in the Yup’ik communities of Bethel and Aniak, has firsthand knowledge about the challenges of providing services to children in remote areas.
She says tribes can step in within minutes, to assist, where state social workers might have to travel by airplane from Anchorage, which adds another layer of complications. Davidson says response from the state can take hours, weeks, and sometimes months.
“Tribes have had decades of proven track record– of improving programs really through incredible innovation. Those tribal partnerships are happening everywhere.”
Davidson says, had ICWA been overturned, it could have jeopardized programs that have been decades in the making.
Gone Native, a series of animated digital shorts, is using comedy to help education people about Indigenous life.
KNBA’s Hannah Bissett has more.
Gone Native has been in the works for the last five years.
First debuting in film festivals, the inspiration for the short series comes from a surprising place.
Joey Clift (citizen of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe) is a writer.
“A Facebook post a few friends of mine made a few years about the protests against the at the time, unfortunately, named Washington DC NFL team’s name, and somebody commented on the post saying something to the effect of ‘Hey, I just got my DNA test in the mail, and it says I’m 1/100th Indian, and personally, I think the team name is fine, so everyone just lay off!’”
Clift’s the creative writer behind the five episode short series.
He says, after this internet encounter, he wanted to find quick, comedic, and educational material to show to the person, and the most he could see were longer think pieces.
In response to this lack of material, he created his own.
He says that he also took inspiration from his experiences in the workforce, growing up, and listening to other Indigenous people about their experiences.
He says the response to the shorts has been immense, with millions of views over various platforms.
“It’s so validating to see that something I created didn’t just make people laugh, but it is equipping Native kids easy jokes that they can use to diffuse what would otherwise be a bummer, you know, racial microaggression situation.”
Clift wants everyone who listens to the series to learn something new.
According to a recent study from Illuminative, 87% of state history standards across the US for the curriculum of K-12 do not mention Native American history after 1900.
“And I think that that lack of education is what has lead to so many of these weird microaggressions against Native people and Native people in the mainstream because people just don’t know any better.”
The series has seen praise internet-wide, giving Indigenous people short, comedic material to educate peers.
“I hope you watch the series – but I hope you also go to GoneNative.tv and click around, read those links, and get a little more educated about these issues so I don’t have to correct bosses when they call a meeting a powwow ever again.”
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